Brian Selznick

Marvels

The Marvels

Sarah Sammis

Meh. Selznick's art style in these books hasn't really evolved. It's well crafted but one book looks very much like another. What once seemed daring now just is. Then there's Albert and Joseph's story which gets buried under all those drawings at the front of the book. The drawings are stand ins for the ones described in the book as drawn by Albert. Except, they don't look any different from the drawings in The Invention of Hugo Cabret or Wonderstruck, making it impossible to get any sense of Albert as artist. Albert just comes off as a bitter man dying of AIDS, rather than a grieving lover compelled to finish his homage to his lover. Thus, meh.

More: http://pussreboots.pair.com/blog/2016...

Christine

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I still think Wonderstruck was better.

nina 

4.5 stars 
This is one of the most unique books I have ever read. This is my favourite of the Brian Selznick novels. The pictures and the story link together so well and keeps you in suspense! I was so intrigued by the 400 pages of images at the start that for the first 60 pages of text I wanted to go back!!
Definitely worth the read!!

Melissa Palmer

Book #125 Read in 2015
The Marvels by Brian Selznick (YA)

Selznick seamlessly weaves illustrations and prose together in his books, telling the story in two different manners. In this book, Joseph runs away from boarding school to go meet his uncle. The two eventually connect and bond, though that does not happen without its issues. The uncle's house is a place of great history and story and Joseph immediately feels a connection to it. I borrowed this book from the public library.

http://melissasbookpicks.blogspot.com

Destiny J Tamayo

I definitely enjoyed the second half more than the first.

Jelke Lenaerts

I just loved this book.
I was surprised how easy the story in drawings was to follow (does that make sense?). I loved how the second part explained the first part and made it even more wonderfull.

Faith

There is so much effort put into this book.

Lisa Collins

4.5 stars! I really liked this book and can see myself rereading it in the future.

Hope Brockway

Christina Hufford

Full review with pictures posted here.

I am a huge fan of Brian Selznick, absolutely loved The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck, but I'll admit I don't closely follow his career. I found out about The Marvels while scrolling through Tumblr; someone had posted a book stack with a book that had the Selznick trademark spine -- a beautiful illustration of a sliver of a someone's face.

I immediately went into a conniption fit of "HE WROTE ANOTHER BOOK????" and jetted over to Amazon to find it. To my shock, amazement, and suspicion, the book had terrible reviews. To my memory, Hugo and Wonderstruck were 5 star masterpieces and the reviews reflected this, but The Marvels had tons of 1 and 2 star reviews!

This struck me as strange, so I started reading through the poor reviews to see what was up. There, I encountered some ... interesting complaints.

Things like "this is a children's book, not Brokeback Mountain."

Oh.

Apparently, this book had gay characters. And apparently, that was enough for a whole slew of people to leave hateful, distasteful reviews calling for the book's banishment and boycott.

I've never bought anything so fast in all my life.

If you're unfamiliar with Brian Selznick, this is his standard modus operandi -- a beautiful MONSTER of a book that interchanges pencilled illustrations with snippets of text which, together, tell a full, robust, usually emotionally devastating story. His work is gorgeous, and reading his books are a visceral, immersive experience.

For The Marvels, Selznick changed up his own style, which I thought was really inventive: he starts the book off with a story told totally through illustrations, then switches to a fully prose story without a single picture that builds off of the illustrated tale.

The illustrated story begins on a ship in the 1700s and moves through several generations of this theatre family called The Marvels (this frequent time jumping, told only through pictures, got a little confusing, but I stuck with it -- everything fell into place by the end.)

After this very emotional story ends with total devastation and a hole in my aorta, we switch to "present day" (which is really in the 1990s) where a boy, Joseph, has run away from his boarding school and is hoping to hide out at his uncle's -- despite having never met the man before. When he gets to his uncle's, he's very confused. The man lives in a house that's almost a museum, a shrine to a life paused long ago. Joseph finds evidence of the Marvels -- old photographs, portraits, newspaper snippets, and clothes -- and, putting together that these people must be his ancestors, he badgers his uncle to tell him his family's story. But his uncle is cagey and resistant. Something's not right. Joseph soon finds the mystery of the house too alluring not to solve.

What a gorgeous book. And by "gorgeous" I mean I finished this book in first hours of the 24 Hour Readathon, so I was basically sitting outside on the porch at 9 in the morning sobbing my damn eyes out. Don't listen to the vile one-star reviewers calling for a boycott because this book dares to have gay characters. Listen to me: this story is wonderful. Marvelous. It's an emotional, touching story about discovering your family and finding yourself, preserving your past at the expense of forgetting your present. I would encourage anyone of any age to read this lovely book. And to bring tissues. Because guh.

  5/5 stars

Marvels

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